By David Crystal

New from Cambridge University Press!

By Peter Mark Roget

This book "supplies a vocabulary of English words and idiomatic phrases 'arranged … according to the ideas which they express'. The thesaurus, continually expanded and updated, has always remained in print, but this reissued first edition shows the impressive breadth of Roget's own knowledge and interests."

The present volume draws together contributions from a number of scholarswith an interest in empirical, cross-linguistic description. Most of thepapers were first presented at the symposium Information Structure in aCross-linguistic Perspective held in Oslo in November/December 2000.The descriptions are functionally oriented, and their common focus is howinformation structure • in a broad sense • can be compared acrosslanguages. 'Information structure' has been approached in a variety of waysby the authors, so as to give a broad picture of this fundamental principleof text production, involving the way in which a speaker/writer chooses topresent a message in terms of given/new information, focus, cohesion, andpoint of view. Central to much of the research is the problem ofestablishing criteria for isolating linguistic constraints on language usefrom cultural-linguistic conventions in text production. The linguisticcomparison includes English, German and/or one of the Scandinavianlanguages, with sidelights to other languages. Most of the papers are text-or corpus-based, and the ongoing work on parallel corpora in Scandinavia isreflected in several contributions.